Kroes defends ministerial record

NEELIE Kroes, nominated as the next European commissioner for competition, was forced to make a robust defence of her time as Dutch transport minister when she appeared this week before a parliamentary committee investigation.

She rejected allegations that while transport minister she had been influenced by lobbyists over the construction of a freight railroad between the harbour of Rotterdam and Germany.

A Dutch parliamentary committee is investigating two large Dutch infrastructure projects whose costs dramatically exceeded their budgets. Kroes, who grew up in a Rotterdam transport family, was transport minister in the Netherlands in 1982-89. The Rotterdam harbour lobby is said to have played an important role in the decision to build the so-called Betuwelijn. It has been suggested that Kroes would have liked to grant Europe’s biggest harbour extra work derived from the new freight railroad. But Kroes stated during her interrogation that “the conclusion that one isn’t independent does not come up for discussion’’. She explained that research at that time had already shown that it would be “absolutely impossible to transport everything by road”.

The establishment of the Betuwe-route railroad was not discussed until the late eighties. The final decision was taken after Kroes’ term.

Until 17 September, the special committee is questioning almost 60 people, including other former ministers, top civil servants and managers. The aim is to find out what went wrong in the financial forecasting of the Betuwelijn, as well as another major infrastructure project: the building of the high- speed train connecting Amsterdam to Paris.

The costs for the Betuwelijn were estimated at 2.5 billion Dutch guilders (more than €1bn). The EU is expected to contribute around €100 million. The committee calculated that costs now amount to €6.3bn. According to Kroes, parliament should partly blame itself, as it came up with more and more additional demands during the decision and construction process.

Kroes landed the competition portfolio, one of the most important posts in the new Commission team to be led by José Manuel Barroso.